The Department of Geography offers a full range of baccalaureate and graduate degrees with diverse learning and research opportunities, on and off campus. The department offers concentrations in all four major subfields of geography: human, physical, environment and society, and GIScience. Across these subfields we emphasize the geography of global change. Our perspectives span local to global levels across spatial and temporal scales. Addressing these components of global change, we also advance geographical information science and technology needed to use new spatial data generated from combinations of specialized sensors and the Internet of things.
Research and specialization clusters include:
- Environmental Change and Prediction
- Food Security and Human Health
- Geospatial Big Data Analytics
- Population, Environment, and Governance
- Justice, Ethics, and Diversity
- Spatial Modeling and Remote Sensing
The department hosts three major research centers. The GeoVISTA Center (with affiliate labs ChoroPhronesis, GeoInformatics and Earth Observation, and Friendly Cities) emphasizes geovisual analytics, social processes, immersive realities, remote sensing, and human interaction with geospatial information. Emphases in the Center for Landscape Dynamics are understanding the social and ecological factors that govern landscape resilience and inform decision-making in the northeastern US. Riparia conducts and coordinates interdisciplinary research, monitoring, and training on wetlands. Additional departmental labs include PLACE, Vegetation Dynamics, CLIM, HELIX, and GeoSyntheSES, as well as the Gould Center.